Tag Archives: Luke Rhinehart

I’ve been very fortunate over the last few years to exchange occasional and always supportive correspondence with Luke Rhinehart otherwise known as the Dice Man or more properly George Cockcroft. Luke is the author of 10 books plus screen plays and various articles that expand and explain the principles of the Dice and dice living.

George is a unique author whose voice and style often vary from book to book. He has been an inspiration to many and the subject of several songs. Here’s one by the Fall.

I recently received an email from Luke that included the following piece of prose poetry. This very much appeals to my own take on the long walk through the passing days (although I’m guilt of most activities described at one time or other) .

So, lets roll…

NOTHING TO DO, NO ONE TO BE/ ROLL ON.

There is nothing you have to do.

Nowhere you have to go.

No one you have to be.

Roll on.

The sun rises in the morning whether you want it to or not.

The sun sets in the evening no matter how you feel about it.

Sometimes it rains. Your opinion on the matter is not of relevance.

Sometimes some one dies. Every milli-second some one dies. Your grief or rage do not produce a resurrection.

Roll on.

Your car fails to start. Engines do not respond to obscenities.

You have discovered your soul-mate. The universe yawns.

The President of the United States does something particularly thoughtless, stupid and unwise. The bad state of your digestion does not change the President’s mind.

After hours or years of effort you win the big race or big promotion. People still starve to death throughout the world.

The wind veers to blow directly into your face and your progress is slowed. Fortunately you are already wherever you are.

Roll on.

You met someone important to you and know that you made a terrific impression. Too bad. Now you will have to live up to that impression for the rest of your life.

You met someone important to you and know that you made a horrible impression. Good. You can try something different next time.

Roll on.

You feel that no one pays any attention to you. You don’t know how lucky you are. If only people would stop paying attention, we could let go and be whoever we feel at any moment like being. But when we notice someone paying attention then we have to narrow our act to perform for that someone. The role we might really have wanted to play gets stuffed in the costume trunk.

The earth is round. No matter how straight a line we take sooner or later we end up not far from where we started.

A straight line is the best way to travel between two points, and the worst way to travel through life.

Roll on.

Nothing lasts. Thank the Buddha, nothing lasts. All life is cursed and blessed by this simple truth. Nothing lasts. The paradox humans struggle to close their eyes to is that if anything were eternal it would be unimportant. Only change is interesting.

All we do is build mole hills that we imagine are mountains. The first strong wind will blow away all that we thought was eternal.

Life is all change. The man I am at the beginning of this sentence has changed forever before I type the period to end it.

And we thank God it is so. Nothing lasts. Celebrate change because change is life.

But humans fight change and thus fight life. Most human misery lies in the effort to preserve something—someone’s love, wealth, a new sofa, a child’s charm, a talent that is fading. Let them go, let them go. Every effort to preserve something blocks the arrival of something new that might enrich life.

Like this:

I bought a second hand Holga back in 2013. I took a few shots in Dartmouth but only finished the film last week at Cresswell Crags. Like my previous analog adventure I was very much trying to mess with the system. I read a good quote earlier this week ( and I paraphrase) “Photography is unique as an art form in that it’s principle elements are light & time”. The only omission here is chance. Even the most technically skilled photographer relies on the vagaries of the moment and hedges his bets by taking multiple images.

My practice for what it is, relies very much on the later and even more so in this set. The 120 film used in the Holga allows for up to 16 shots and my intention was very much to create images that incorporated multiple fleeting impressions. With this as the prime directive and no preview possibilities, chance rules. So, as I’m sure Luke Rhinehart would agree, you choose your weapon, roll the dice and live with the consequence. The only hope is that the vague transforming vision that exists utterly without substance in the mind can translate into the capture of nothingness on film.

As it turns out, other that a little post processing Snapseed editing for sharpness, contrast & grain, these are the images and I’m really quite happy with them. I think they are mysterious and ephemeral exercises in the light/ time/chance juggling. In at least one image two different locations are pulled together almost seamlessly. Like failing memory their resonance ceases to rely on truth or accuracy but on deeper responses. They have the appearance of ‘evidence of ghosts’ pictures or the forensic inquisitions of sci-fi investigations.

A quick thank you to Photo Nottingham who developed the film and Pete who scanned them for me. If you click on the images they will open up to full size.

I haven’t done an App review before but as this one is fairly unique and based around the work of the great Luke Rhinehart @OfficialDiceMan how could I not.

Developed by AppVantage the #DiceLifeApp is your mobile portal to Dice Living. You need never be stuck for a decision again. You can now lead a blameless life, absolved from responsibility, when choosing the evenings activities, which bar to visit, what to eat and even how to entertain a loved one. With a simple shake your life enters a new land of freedom as you give yourself to the dice.

First published in 1971 ‘The Dice Man’ by Luke Rhinehart gained cult status amongst counter culture idealogs and the socially adventurous. Written in an autobiographical style the book relates the progress of psychologist Rhinehart as he gives himself over to chance.

Often referenced, occasionally filmed and still contemporary given our therapy & self-help driven world the book is a great read.

Here’s the press release for the App which hit the iTunes store on Friday.

Dice Life combines entertainment with a radical approach to life – Surrender to the dice as they make your decisions and lead you to new and exciting experiences! (and you’ll have fun on the way).

Inspired by Luke Rhinehart’s internationally bestselling novel THE DICE MAN, the Dice Life app combines entertainment with a radical approach to life.

Break the habits of a lifetime and let Chance be your guide.Some of Dice Life’s features:

Don’t know what to do tonight? Roll the Dice to find local bars, restaurants, theatres, cinemas. Or stay at home and let the Dice choose a recipe, a TV channel, a book or a film.

Want to find someone to hang out with? Dice Life will add six of your Facebook friends to a die and you can involve them in your Dice Life by just rolling to choose.

Don’t know who’s round it is? Take a photo of each of your mates and shake your device – Dice Life will choose for you.

Fancy a random night out with your mates? Follow the Dice as they lead you around any city, and pick from six unique dice-based drinking games.

As your dicing experience grows, the challenges that the Dice throw your way intensify. Who can survive Rhinehart’s Roulette? Or spend an hour as an angry pirate or some other dice-dictated role? Or follow the challenges of the Kama Sutra?

Begin as a Dice Apprentice and work all the way up to Dice Master, unlocking new content as you play.

Your progress through Dice Life is monitored by the elusive Dice Master – he’ll be your guide as you submit to Chance.

Submit your dicelife experiences to be included in Luke’s newest book, THE DICE MAN DIARIES.Great when used alone – even better with a group of friends – Dice Life will transform even the most boring evening into an adventure.

My first reading of the Dice Man was at art school when I had an interest in all things mindful, from Jung & Freud to Laing & Leary. At one point I made a dice matrix for drawing that covered subject, style, colour & media. It was an experiment of passing interest and locked away in a gallery corridor for the almost my entire second year and left to my own devices it formed a part of other strange exercises from left hand drawing, exquisite corpse beasts and blindfold portraiture. They don’t make art schools like that any more.

So, the DiceLifeApp, still a little bit unstable and slow to load but it makes great use of location services and finding links. The initial download is free but you need to buy the full version to unlock the Karma Sutra dice, the drinking games (? Eeekkk!), a FaceBook dice for random stalking, Cuisine Dice (with what look like edible recipes) & PhotoDice (not tried this yet). The Free Text dice allows you to write your own random destiny, this is probably the one that interests me the most so look out for an update once I’ve had a think about it. The Role Play dice gives you the options to conduct your day as a worried politician, manic comedian, close to tears sea captain and sleazy queen. Once in character you can chose what to do – Go out and eat, Stay in & cook, go to a bar etc all in the manner of your character. Dice need imagination but think of the free brain time now you don’t have all those tedious decisions to make.

If you link your app to your Face Book account you can share you rolls with your friends. Just beware of sharing your Karma Sutra results.

I’m going to give this 5 Stars for getting it out there in the first place (hanging an app on a 40 year old book about personal freedoms is quite an achievement) , a small deduction for crashyness which I’m sure will be stabilised soon and pending further investigation a few points for being self-scriptable. If I can work up a set of creative choices for drawing or photography I’ll be quite pleased with it.

Like this:

Very occasionally I am reminded that in the past I rather misguidedly considered myself to be a complete genius. This is always under review. At this particular moment, glowing with the pride of a gang of irradiated lions, it seems I may have been right!

Some may have noticed that the singularly greatest method of communication invented by opposable thumbed monkeys is Twitter. The concise brevity required to tweet your song across the world focuses the mind with a trajectory of laser guided pin point accuracy on concept & content.

It also allows those of us possessed by ennui to stalk the more noticed monkeys roaming the planet, and on occasion garner a response from them.

I have been fortunate over the last few months to forge strong (well tenuous and transient) friendships with many of the great & good. Top of my list is the generous & humane @MrMichaelWinner and more recently the cultural icon known as @OfficialDiceMan.

Now these glittering diamonds are probably not the first two names you would expect to see in the same sentence, but think about it…. imagine the possibilities!

Michael Winner, the acclaimed director of accepted classics such as Deathwish, Deathwish III, Appointment With Death, Hannibal Brooks, The Wicked Lady and The Big Sleep (commendable remake with Robert Mitchum). Team this up with Luke Rhinehart counter-culture dicing guru, lord of the random, grizzled supplicant to chance….and what have you got?

Well I think you have the option on the greatest story ever told. You would of course need to marry chance with intent. The script would run like time itself, capable of splitting off into multiple dimensions, infinite possibility. Anything is possible, but we won’t need to worry, we will be insured to the hilt and Captained by a master seaman, possessed of a well used
shaker and almost spherical dice.

I will be hitting my attic soon to dig through my archived library in the hopes of finding my copy of the Diceman. Many years ago whilst at Art School I spent a good part of my second year hiding in the dark second floor corridor that passed as a studio. Holed away with only occasional attention from the teaching staff I experimented with blind-fold portraiture and dice informed process and palette based printmaking.

So, once I have been back through the book I plan to offer my new found friends a treatment for a Diceman movie. I know it won’t be the first filmed option but I’m sure if we get the right people on board we can clean up and get a hand full of the little gold blokes.

I say we put @MrMichaelWinner in charge of the project overall but with modern technology we can achieve an interactive DVD / BluRay release . At given points during the narrative we install a ‘Dice Me’ button. The viewer throws the die and from a list of options the story lurches off in a new direction. We employ a range of Directors (Lynch, Cameron, Almodovar, Von Tier,
Howard, Leigh) who progress their own narrative, and when they reach another chosen point, we throw again and juggle the directors. @OfficialDiceMan gets creative control over the options for the narrative development and the directors are allocated a plot line by….. the throw of a dice. This way it’s all fair so no egos to get out of control.

The soundtrack would of course be started up by Jimmy Page (based on his previous good work with Mr Winner) but with the theory in place he could allocate new chapter tracks to other carefully selected musicians or contemporary beat combo’s.

In theory with enough break points in the story we could produce a moving picture experience that would never be the same no matter how many times it was viewed!

I’m still working on how best to operate the theatre events but it would probably involve making a dice driven selection of audience members in the queue who get to cast the cube at the appropriate juncture in the screening.

Why this has never been attempted before is beyond me. Someday all movies will be made this way. It cuts out the need for pre-release screenings because audience feedback is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who the actors are as the characters they play will be interchangeable (a little like the brilliant ‘I’m Not There’ by Todd Haynes, in fact sign him up as well….).

I think it was Jung that pointed out that there are only seven stories (or was it Dylan that pointed out that there are only seven songs?) …. whatever…..with the will and commitment we clean up in this town and keep vast amounts of directors, actors, production crew and sound track writers
in full employment for perpetuity. If we stick with the archetypes we can’t go wrong.

The world needs an arthouse franchaise and I am here to say that this is it!